Hero of the Pacific_ The Life of Marine Legend John Basilone - James Brady [60]
Apparently a hush then came over the big room, and for the first time the thing was no longer a circus or an adversarial process, a scrimmage between aggressive reporters and photographers and an overwhelmed Marine still unused to any of this. With Marine public affairs officers and noncoms in charge on their own turf, even the cocky press boys calmed down, stopped shouting, settled in to take notes and let the man speak. Basilone, at last and perhaps for the first time, would be able to tell his story quietly and in a measured and orderly fashion, without interruption, as he best remembered it.
“I started to talk and as the words poured out, I became oblivious to the reporters and all the confusion going on about me. I told them how there had been a heavy tropical rain all day long.” Then he told them about the fight, starting with that field phone’s ringing at about ten that night, warning that a Japanese attack was about to hit their ridgelines, and went on from there, taking a live audience with him through the nightmare hours of darkness and into the welcoming gray half-light of another dawn, trying to explain how an exhausted, stressed man in mortal combat felt about having lived to see yet another day.
Except for an unlikely Manila John word like “oblivious,” it almost seems that this would be the press conference where Basilone made some sort of a breakthrough, realizing that if he just told the story in his own way and his own words, he might be able to handle the challenge of speaking in public. And when the machine gunner had wrapped up his story and a colonel called a halt to the proceedings, each of the newspaper reporters, not shouting now but rather subdued, walked up and asked to shake his hand.
“With that they filed out of the press room. I was a little shaken, retelling those terrible hours all over again.” Shaken, sure, but he had coped, had talked at some length, and if not articulately then clearly, to hard-bitten professional journalists. He had not only responded to their questions but, it was quite apparent, moved some of those hard-shelled pros. Peter Vitelli, one of my sources in Raritan, supplied me the CD of a Basilone sound bite, so I’ve actually heard his voice talking to an admiring crowd. He could be an effective speaker.
Now, as Basilone’s tour of the United States was about to start, Phyllis’s account becomes quite detailed and precise, with dates, places, events, names, and ranks, everything but serial numbers. Her son Jerry’s later but parallel version differs somewhat in the racier details of the journey.
According to Phyllis, the same public relations colonel who’d calmed and encouraged Basilone earlier now took him aside in D.C. and briefed him on the coming agenda. The tour would kick off shortly, the month of September 1943, roughly a year after Basilone and the rest of the 7th Marines went ashore on the ’Canal. “The colonel came over to me and told me to sit down and take it easy. He then outlined the coming bond tour. I was assigned to Flight number 5 of the War Veterans Airmadas [you begin to suspect a Madison Avenue ad agency copywriter at work here in the jargon, with that coined word “Airmadas”]. My companions were to be Sergeant Schiller Cohen, Bosun’s Mate 2nd Class Ward L. Gemmer, Machinist Mate 1st Class Robert J. Creak, and film stars Virginia Grey, Martha Scott, Eddie Bracken, John Garfield, and Gene Lockhart [Keenan Wynn would be added].” Not precisely the A-list of Hollywood legends, but not bad. The destinations were largely and conveniently in the Northeast to start. “We were to